Customer Reviews

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Vintage)

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Don't be put off by the lame cover design. The late Mr. Hofstadter's book deserves your attention, particularly in light of recent American history.

'The Paranoid Style' is in fact a collection of essays, the first four of which are thematically-related studies of American hyper-conservatism. (I won't discuss the other essays in this review.) In the first, Hofstadter brings to light earlier historical avatars of conservative paranoia, reaching back to 18th century fears of 'Illuminati' and Freemasons, and 19th century anti-Catholic sentiment. Hofstadter then contextualizes the then-current anti-communist movement and McCarthyism as the latest examples of a 'style' of American political rhetoric that cannot brook coincidence, and that, in contrast, prefers to see historical events, which are largely beyond our control, as the evidence of a vast and perfect conspiracy to destroy America and its values.

In the next essays, Hofstadter engages with what he calls 'pseudo-conservatism,' a philosophy embodied in those ultra-right wing movements that do not seek to conserve or guide our social institutions at all, but instead wish to tear them out root and branch, on the grounds of their complete and utter corruption. At the time, Hofstadter's targets were right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society, but above all Barry Goldwater and his supporters. These 'pseudo-conservatives' rejected completely the moderate Republican leadership of the time, and sometimes went so far as to accuse them of treason. What the pseudo-cons offered instead of the generally successful continuation of New Deal social policy or the careful stand-off of the Cold War, was the complete reversal of government intervention into social welfare and a hyper-aggressive stance toward communism that did not deem global thermo-nuclear war to be an unacceptable outcome.

The portrait of Barry Goldwater is particularly chilling. Goldwater's instrumentalization of 'moral values' as an electoral wedge, and his Manichean and apocalyptic vision of world politics -- reflected in the title of his book "Why not Victory?" - thankfully did not seduce the American electorate of 1964. But Goldwater's influence on Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is beyond dispute.

I read this book when it was first published in the 1960's. Now, gee, just when I had completely forgotten about it, along comes the Tea Party movement and those wackoes declaring Obama the first Communist president since Eisenhower, and others shouting racial and homophobic epithets at congressmen. As I recall, Prof. Hoffstedter said this kind of uprising occurs about once every 20 years or so (and, here in the Pacific Northwest, I recall the Posse Comitatus crowd in the late 1970's who believed the IRS was illegal because Ohio wasn't a state, or something like that, so this sort of thing seems about as regular as Halley's Comet, just more frequent and less exciting to watch). But I suppose that if the original Tea Party in 1773 had just shortened their slogan to, "No taxation," either we would have begun the American Revolution a little sooner, or (more likely)the American revolutionaries would have been written off as a bunch of nut jobs and all the rest of us would still be singing God Save the Queen.
But Hoffstedter's book really made sense of these periodic paroxysms in our society and, thanks to the wackoes, the book retains its great vitality and relevance. Be sure to buy the book now, though, before the Stamp Act party returns in 2030. And I can't wait for the Know-Nothings (or are they hiding amidst the Tea Party?)

This is an excellent book, in spite of the fact that the original copyright is 1952. The Pulitzer prize winning author, Richard Hofstadter, updated the book through 1965. He died in 1970. It actually covers American politics through the Goldwater years. The descriptions of activities draw an amazingly close parallel to our present day situations.

In an era when hate mongering, fear mongering, and divisiveness seem to be the order of the day, Hofstadter's essays help identify the roots of the paranoid style in American politics. Perhaps, now that this book has been republished, more people will read his essays, and work together to assuage the extreme fears and resentments that drive the paranoid style.

What I love about Richard Hofstadter is how well he writes and how well he builds arguments. These elements help explain why he remains as relevant today as he was throughout the 1950s and 1960s. This collection of essays features his classic work on American paranoia as how it impacts politics (birth movement, much?) and several very thoughtful analyses on Barry Goldwater.

I found the introduction by Sean Wilentz to be sorely lacking in depth. I also found the second half of the collection to be less useful and dated. However, overall, this is a classic primary source by one of the country's greatest thinkers.

Back to the future
4 stars

Hofstader's 1966 collection of essays, written in more of a journalist style than an academic one, is split into two parts: `Studies in the American Right' and `Some Problems of the Modern Era'. The first part, which is almost exactly half of the book, is four essays that explore Hofstader's evolving understanding of what he calls `the pseudo-conservative right', a not very politically correct term for self-described conservatives who are not defenders of the status quo but radicals looking to create a utopia based on uncompromising adherence to conservative values.

The first essay is the broadest and most important in the book. He argues that during periods of debate about fundamental values, the US has seen eruptions of what he calls `the paranoid style' in politics. He is unflinching in dissecting it, not only discussing its broad psychology but its quirks, like its fact-gathering footnote-obsessed research. The following quote gives a good sense of the paranoid style and of Hofstader's:

>The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming "proof" of the particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing it not coherent--in fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities. It is, if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic; it believes that is is up against an enemy who is infallibly rational as he is totally evil, and it seeks to match his imputed total competence with its own, leaving nothing explained and comprehending all of reality in one overreaching, consistent theory. It is nothing if not "scholarly" in technique. (36-37)

The next three essays focus on pseudo-conservatives proper, particularly as they were galvanized by Barry Goldwater's election campaign. Writing so close to the events, Hofstader mostly buys into the view that LBJ's landslide victory in 1964 demonstrated the fallacy of far right organizing, a view that has been rubbished by history.

That said, the phrase that comes to mind first with these essays is `ripped from the headlines'. These essays do much more to explain the conflicts over the federal deficit between the Tea Party and Obama than anything written today. Indeed, if you had an electronic copy of these essays and you did a `find and replace' with `Goldwater' and `the Tea Party', you could pass them off as something written in 2011 and offer a reasonable trajectory of the 2012 GOP primaries:

>The convention showed the nation for the first time how well organized the right-wing movement was, but it also proved, as the subsequent campaign was to prove again, that the right wing, though brilliantly organized for _combat_ was not organized to conciliate or persuade. Having convinced themselves that the forces they were fighting were conspiratorial and sinister, not to say treasonous, they found it impossible to shake off the constricting mental framework of the paranoid style. (111-12)

The second half of the book deals with three separate issues, whose only real connecting thread is an emphasis on the rise and fall of what Hofstader might call `illegitimate political passions': the acquisition of an empire during the Spanish American War, the fate of the anti-trust movement and the great debate about gold versus silver in the late nineteenth century as seen through the personal history of a popular silver crank'. These essays are more about historical puzzles than anything, asking questions like, with the advantage of hindsight, who had a better grasp of economics, the backers of gold or silver? And what did happen to the anti-trust movement anyway? These essays are nowhere near as timely as the first half of the book, but they are still enjoyable, insightful and well-written.

This is really a book that deserves more attention than it receives these days.

Hofstadter makes many contentions that are, for lack of a better word, unsubstantiated. The theme of his book is that the American far right has historically been "paranoid" and that this paranoia has generally come out during periods of severe economic crises such as the Great Depression of early 20th Century and the late 1800s and during periods the country felt under serious external and internal threat (i.e., during the early 1950s). He cites facts that, to him, point out "paranoia" on the political scene. For example, he cited the views of many that U.N. black helicopters were roaming the skies of the U.S. during the 1960s. Unfortunately he provides little evidence that such views really are "paranoid". With respect to the previously cited example of U.N. helicopters, he mocks congressional hearings that gathered evidence on the issue while not discussing the conclusioins reached by the commissions.

All his views make, as the publishers of this book intend, the current (especially since the government and Obama induced economic crisis since 2008) American right look paranoid. The book clearly has a politically ideological axe to grind. The publishers clearly intend to mock patriotic heroes that have clearly and strongly pointed out, on the basis of strong evidence, Obama's questionanable U.S. citizenship and his Marxist-Leninist views. These views have all been documented in many books (many of which have been best sellers) such as:

Gangster Government: Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy

Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance between Barack Obama and Wall Street

The Roots of Obama's Rage

Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President

The Obama Nation

How Obama Embraces Islam's Sharia Agenda (Encounter Broadsides)

The Blueprint: Obama's Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency

To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine

The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America

Conduct Unbecoming: How Barack Obama is destroying the Military and Endangering Our Security

A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media

Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation

Crimes against Liberty: An Indictment of President Barack Obama

The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists

Many of these books have not only been NY Times best sellers but have been written by academics and well known intellectuals such as Jerome Corsi (PhD from Harvard), Dinesh D'Souza (White House Fellow under Bush Sr. and former American Enterprise Fellow) and Newt Gingrich (PhD and leading conservative intellectual). Despite the well documented, in-depth and academic facts put forth in these books they have been nothing but derided by leftists. If Hofstadter were alive today, no doubt he would be doing the same (thus showing his inability to come to terms with facts instead of unsupported political opinions).

During the 1960 Barry Goldwater had coined the term "egghead" to refer to the perversely over educated, such as Hofstadter, who were simply unable to see reality and simply passed it off as "paranoia". As the reader goes through the book he or she sees where Goldwater was coming from. It's a shame Goldwater is not alive to point this out to today's leftist followers of Hofstadter.